


departure

by koniens



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, F/M, Loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 22:44:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13797894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koniens/pseuds/koniens
Summary: Shinji's disappearance has left Asuka with nothing but a broken melody and an empty silence.





	departure

Asuka hates silence. 

She’s despised it since birth and her loathing grows stronger with each passing day. Even in her own room it’s suffocating. She can feel it bury deep into her chest, sinking its sharp talons into her ribcage before climbing up her bones and plunging into her heart. She can’t stand it, how it threatens her every night now that he’s gone. She suddenly feels the urge to gag. Despondency was always Shinji’s job, not hers. 

“Disgusting,” she mutters but there’s no one there to wince at her words.

Warily, she shifts her position in bed and clutches her white bedsheets with closed fists. She turns her head to her window and watches the slates of light that sliver in through the slits between her curtains where the glass pane is exposed. She lifts an arm and traces the white rectangles that scattered across her room as a result of the midnight glow. Some remain solitary upon the ceiling---stationary street-lamps flickering alone along sidewalks in the dark. Others ghosted across the walls---cars passing by with a quiet rumble atop pavement. 

She inhales a sharp breath and releases a heavy sigh. At this point, even Asuka with her distaste for failure believes that it’s futile to force herself into slumber. She’s too tired to stop her mind from battering against her own skull out of restlessness. 

With weighted limbs, she rises and sits supine on her mattress, her sheets crumpling inwards against her thighs. To ease her mind, she stares at the walls with wavering eyes, never focusing on a singular object.

Her room is clear-cut and clean, without a trace of mess. The surface of the desk across her bed is stripped bare. Ironed clothes are folded neatly and tucked within drawers. Various objects line the wooden shelves nailed atop her door but their origins are long forgotten. Picture frames hang throughout her room but the default pictures haven’t been replaced. Their glass panes still protect fake families poised with false smiles in front of a white backdrop.

Asuka’s name is on the door but the room doesn’t really belong to her. It doesn’t belong to anyone at all.

She’d never admit it but she misses Shinji’s company. Not Shinji himself but the soft murmur of voices slipping out of his headphones as he lies awake in the dark. The quiet whirring of his tape as he presses rewind. To Asuka, his presence served to crack the silence that enveloped her when alone. 

The first time she had reunited with Shinji was sometime a few months ago.

“What do you want?” she had seethed when she swung open the door to see his dishevelled figure and hollow eyes.

“A place to stay.” He smiled weakly at her. Despite his prolonged absence from her life, Asuka could still identify the sharp outline of his SDAT tucked inside the front pocket of his pants. She scoffed.

“You haven’t seen me in two years and you want us to start living together?” she snarled and leaned towards him with a scowl. She didn’t bother to ask where he’s been all this time. Frankly, she couldn’t bring herself to even care. “Besides, why me? It wouldn’t be right for a man to start living together so suddenly with a woman. People would talk.” 

Shinji didn’t answer. Instead, he shifted his weight on his feet and scratched his temple with a finger sheepishly, a small smile spread across his face. In reality, Asuka knows he didn’t care what others would think. Neither did she.

“Fine, whatever. Stay if you want, I couldn’t care less.” She spat in contempt before slamming the door into his face. 

The days following Shinji’s return passed by slowly. Time seemed to move like a passenger on a train, always travelling steadily amidst the soft rumble of wheels on tracks. 

They would rise together in silence in the morning and sit at the kitchen table without speaking a word. Shinji would flip through the news and Asuka would tap her fingers to an easily forgotten melody she heard once on the radio. The sun would peek through the curtains and bathe the wooden floors with a mellow light. Asuka would lazily look over the rim of her coffee cup to glance at Shinji everytime she took a sip, never failing to roll her eyes when he smiled in reply. 

At night, Asuka would stare at the ceiling as she lay in bed under white covers. The faint sound of music from Shinji’s room across from hers slips into the darkness through the crack in the doorway she always leaves. 

Once the days since his return shifted into months, Shinji disappeared.

On that day, when Asuka unlocked the front door with grocery bags heavy in her hands, the apartment was dark. Even without calling out his name, she already knew that he was gone. 

She stumbled lazily into the kitchen, her arms aching from the weight of the plastic bags. When she finally reached the fridge, one bag split open and an orange fell to the ground emitting a series of short, dull thuds. It skidded across the wooden floors before slowing to a stop underneath the kitchen table.

The moonlight peered through an open window behind her and drowned Asuka in a suffocating light. The urge to turn around and snarl at the ghostly orb suspended in the sky and its mocking existence overwhelmed her. Instead, her eyes drifted to the table’s surface where an object lies in the dark outside the moon’s wrath.

Upon the table, a hastily scribbled note scrawled on cheap parchment paper peeked out from underneath Shinji’s worn SDAT. Asuka snatched the message and crumpled it into her fist. She tossed it into the trash without reading it.

She was too tired to be angry. She should have known about his sudden disappearance. Shinji was like that, he could never stay in the same place for too long.

Just like that night, it’s quiet now. To Asuka, every night since then has been like this. She’s trapped in a glitched video game, her character forced to repeat the same scene over and over again in falling pixels.

Once again, the moonlight creeps into her room like an uninvited guest. This time, it shines upon the cable of Shinji’s headphones spilling out through the opening of her bedside drawer where she’d hidden it. Any other time, she would have slammed the drawer shut, concealing his forgotten belongings from sight but tonight she doesn’t. Instead, she wraps her hand around the wires of the SDAT and pulls it onto her lap. 

She slips the headphones over her ears, and brushes her fingers over the SDAT’s small buttons. The white paint that marked “play” is chipped, only the tip of the triangle still visible against the device’s black exterior. She exhales a sigh before tentatively pushing it.

Leaning her head against the headboard of her bed, Asuka closes her eyes. A gentle melody begins to drizzle slowly into her ears. The music flows through the wire of her headphones like trickling water. The notes whispers into her ears, a hushed secret only she can hear. She can almost see gloved hands gliding over ivory piano keys as if in a bewitched trance. His hands.

Asuka gathers her knees to her chest and presses her forehead to them. She begins to sob. Her voice is hoarse and she wails as if in brutal agony. Her chest feels heavy, her ribs ready to collapse onto her heart. 

She hates Shinji, she hates his SDAT and she hates how lonely she feels now that he’s gone. She hates herself, she hates that there isn’t anything she can do to bring him back. She hates everything, she wants to pull the blinds over the world and wait for herself to drop out of existence and convert into a mere speck on the universe like a tiny fly on a glass pane. 

She holds onto the SDAT, her fingers wrapping around its hard edges with enough force to crack the plastic into pieces. She closes her eyes and envisions her soul leaking out of her body and slipping through the wires of the headphones. She imagines it implanting itself into Shinji’s SDAT, whirring around in circles as it spins inside the tape being played. She pretends she doesn’t know that she’s only doing this to forget.

To forget that the only thing she has left, is a broken melody and an empty silence.


End file.
